


The Same River Twice

by DragoJustine



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Episode: s04e20 The Last Man, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-07-05
Updated: 2008-07-05
Packaged: 2017-12-17 20:04:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/871449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DragoJustine/pseuds/DragoJustine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John comes back from 48,000 years in the future, and has to figure out how *this* Rodney could ever have become *that* Rodney.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Same River Twice

**Author's Note:**

> Big thanks to desertport, my personal beta ninja. All mistakes reflect poorly on me, not her.

John was disoriented and dehydrated and exhausted, despite seven hundred years of sleep. He felt the weight of time settle on his bones in a way he hadn’t when he passed through the gate and traveled forty-eight millennia in a single step. Rodney flickered to life in front of him. The same ugly sweater and deep jowls seemed natural this time, didn’t even surprise him. Rodney looked exactly the same. 

The light was red and very, very dim, the light of an old star. It had slid down the spectrum over the centuries until most of it had shifted out of the range of human eyes, leaving the windows glowing dully, like dying embers. The message was clear: _humanity is no longer welcome under this sun_. John reached down for his tac vest, only to feel the material crumble to dust under his fingers. There was no rust on his weapon -- no water, every drop of moisture had boiled off this planet, the air in his lungs felt more searingly dry than Afghanistan’s ever had -- but he wouldn't trust it in the field now anyway. So he grabbed his IDC but left his gear, a bleached-out husk, an "I was here" on a shore farther away from home than he had ever thought it possible to be. 

He stumbled after Rodney through that red light and desiccated air to the gateroom, trying not to look at Atlantis lifeless all around him. It was like crawling through a lover's corpse. He felt the crazy urge to smooth his hands over her walls, speak soft words to her, try to coax her back to life -- but she wouldn't warm beneath his touch. She had been faithful for fifty-eight millennia, sheltered him for seven centuries as the atmosphere burned away, remained steadfast through a depth of time that he can't begin to comprehend, and now he could ask no more of her. She deserved her rest.

They reached the gate at last, and John cleared his throat, trying to shake the feeling of disturbing a holy place. "So, will it work?"

"Yes, yes. The flare is perfect, we're in plenty of time." There was a long pause, and Rodney added, "Not long now. I mean, you must be eager to get back, to l--"

 _To leave_ , and John suddenly saw Rodney in his mind's eye, closing the wormhole and then simply ceasing to exist. 

For maybe the first time in his adult life, John felt the overwhelming need to reach out, to make physical non-sexual contact with another person, to hug Rodney tight against him, because the constriction in his chest simply would not let him breathe if he didn’t. But he couldn’t, of course. 

The Rodney standing in front of him was only manipulated light, and the real Rodney, the one he needed to touch, wasn’t even dust any longer. 

The wormhole opened behind him, and he stood there dumbly with his hand raised. The man in front of him was both strange and familiar, a distorted reflection of someone who long ago gave up everything to save him. The idea of Rodney dying for him was utterly unbearable. 

The hologram, the man he was about to leave behind, waved his hand in a gesture of irritated impatience that could not be feigned. "There's no time for this, Sheppard. You're on a clock. Remember, you have to get to Teyla before the baby is born. You’re our only chance to fix this."

John nodded and walked up the ramp. He strained his ears, but the last soft sound of "goodbye, John" never came.

***

The next few days passed in a rush of gunfire and adrenaline. Finally it was over. They really did it, saved Teyla and foiled Michael, and everyone could breathe again, for the time being. That was a problem, because once he had time to think, he could only think, _was that enough? Did I do everything you needed me to do? Did I live up to what you expected from me? Did I justify your sacrifice?_

John was in mourning for someone who wasn’t dead, and his mind was chasing around in circles of _Rodney died to rescue me_ and _I walked through that gate and left him_ , even as he saw him in the mess or across a conference table at least once a day. 

Their conversations were stilted and awkward. Rodney started to babble at him one day about an Ancient device that just might possibly be a personal hoverboard, hands waving and words tumbling over each other in excitement. He paused, looked at John expectantly, obviously waiting for the manic little-boy delight in his eyes and the carefully nonchalant, “cool” that John knew he was supposed to deliver. Instead, John stared straight through him, seeing a man with an ugly sweater and deep creases in his forehead, wondering if he would ever talk with that Rodney again, wondering how this Rodney could possibly have become that one.

The pause was just a little too long before John managed to jolt himself into speech. “Hoverboard. That’s, uh, cool.” 

Rodney’s exuberant hands had stilled in the pause, and now he said, “I guess I’ll just run some more tests, then, before you try to activate it?” John was supposed to insist on activating it now, but he was still trying to remember how to talk to this Rodney, the one who wasn’t yet (and probably never would be) that Rodney, and somehow the moment slipped by. Rodney turned and walked back toward the lab, a line of hurt and puzzlement wrinkling his forehead. John watched him go, watched the line in his forehead that wasn’t quite in the right place. 

After a few more conversations like that, Rodney started getting up to leave the mess the minute John sat down. John didn’t go to him, because... because it wasn’t like Rodney owed him anything. It wasn’t like he could say to Rodney what he would have said to that other man. Because they weren’t really the same. That other Rodney -- that was different. This was just McKay, and McKay didn’t want to deal with him now. 

***

It was three in the morning, but six straight days of non-stop guerilla ops on nothing like a twenty-four-hour cycle had taken their toll, and 0300 was as good a time as any to catch up on paperwork. He settled in to read his backlog of reports. But there was something wrong, something off, because this was three times the backlog there should have been. That's when he realized. _Twelve days._

He remembered coming through the gate, holding his hands up to calm the security detail, speaking straight to Colonel Carter. He remembered speaking maybe one sentence to Rodney before his attention was focused entirely on their mission, before he was dragging them all off on heroics again. 

_Once I figured out what happened to you I realized there was nothing we could do. The Air Force pronounced you KIA..._

He had been gone for twelve days, and Rodney had spent twelve days running gate diagnostics and pouring over wormhole physics and cross-linking past mission reports and pulling out the last fifty addresses dialed from the other gate and doing everything he could to find some explanation, some way to get John back.

If John hadn't come back, Rodney would have eventually dedicated twenty-five years of his life to bringing him back. If John hadn't come back, Rodney would have -- Because he was the same man. Not a different Rodney, not some alternate to the one John's been desperate to somehow speak to again, but someone who would do exactly the same-- 

John took off for Rodney’s quarters at a walk that he determinedly kept to a dignified, meandering pace.

He knocked, and then knocked again, louder, and Rodney growled in a way that was almost certainly short for, “Whoever you are, I will personally see to it that you die in a grotesque yet amusing way as soon as I have my coffee.” John thought, _Please, I just have to-- please, just let me--_ and the door slid sweetly open in front of him. 

Rodney sat up in bed and made a confused noise, and then an irritable one, and then said, “Sheppard, do you have any idea how many layers of security locks you just bypassed on that door?”

John answered, “Not really,” and Rodney said, “I hate your gene with a blinding passion, I hope you know.”

Then they just stared at each other, Rodney twisting sideways on the bed to face him and looking like his eyes couldn’t quite focus. His t-shirt was badly wrinkled and twisted awkwardly around his chest, and his mouth seemed even more lopsided than usual. There was no light except the harsh spill from the corridor, and John found himself wishing he could see better.

The lights in Rodney’s quarters came up into a very soft, even glow, and the door slid shut behind him. John shoved his hands into his pockets and tried to calculate the probability that, if he really, really wished for it, Atlantis would be able to open the floor and swallow him.

“Did you wake me up just to give me a magic show and watch me seethe with envy, or did you have some purpose?” Rodney asked, but his tone came out more grumpy than snide. John felt the sudden, intense, overwhelming desire to tell Rodney… something. He thought he might be going insane. Images of brave Dutch boys and dikes flitted through his head as he cast about for a cover story.

Rodney seemed to have gotten tired of waiting for him. “How long have I been sleeping, anyway?”

“I think it was about 1800 when Dr. Keller ordered you to quarters,” John offered.

“My God, nine hours. How wasteful and decadent. Coffee?”

He was digging for his not-terribly-secret stash beside the desk and fiddling with the Ancient miscellaneous-kitchen-device he had squirreled away from the lab. Somehow looking at Rodney’s back and his solid shoulders and the curve of his upper arm instead of at his eyes made everything seem much, much easier. 

“I came to say thank you.”

“For what?” It was a genuine question, spoken with absentminded curiosity. 

Rodney turned around, and easy became much, much harder. “For—Damn it, McKay, you read my report. For saving me. You spent twenty-five-- Anyway, I just. I could never live up to that.” 

“Colonel, that is quite possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard you say, and you’ve provided some fairly tough competition.”

“It’s true! What you did for me, I couldn’t ever have done it for you!” And damn that stupid impulse to contrariness anyway. Damn that way Rodney had of cocking his head as though genuinely trying to evaluate the exact stupidity level he was encountering. It made John want to argue with him. It short-circuited his internal censors. 

“Well, obviously you couldn’t invent an entirely new system of physics for me. If you could, I’d be astonishingly angry at your wasted potential. And I’m certain I wasn’t being selfless anyway. Clearly, I was in it for the intellectual excitement and inevitable posthumous Nobel, mostly. Take your coffee; if you’re going to wake me up at three a.m. you will at least stay awake with me. Besides, Sheppard, you would take a bullet for me.” Rodney paused for a second while he sipped. “You’ve tried fairly strenuously to do that, in fact.” 

“Of course I would take a bullet for you. That’s easy!”

The internal censors abruptly sat up and took notice, exactly five seconds too late. 

Rodney was staring at him like he had just said with absolute conviction that the Wraith were cuddly and cute. That was predictable -- Rodney still sometimes said, “Yes, that’s smart, let’s run _towards_ the gunfire,” even though he had long since given up expecting anything different. But it was true. 

It was true, because running towards the gunfire was all action, reflex and instinct, decision-making done on a level so basic it felt like it happened right down in his brainstem. The highest-order conscious thought John could ever remember having about it was, “Will I be able to live with myself if they die instead of me?” and he’d answered that one back when he was a captain, so definitively that he knew he would never need to ask it again. Jumping in front of the bullet wasn’t a sacrifice; it was a split-second burst of electrical activity in the brain, a single contraction of muscles, something on the order of putting your hands out to catch yourself when you fell. Something couldn’t be difficult if he couldn’t imagine being able to not do it.

Rodney had spent twenty-five years working and thinking and planning and deciding, consciously, every single day, with no instinct and no reflex and no adrenaline. In a lab, not on a battlefield, saving someone who had died years ago rather than someone about to go down right in front of him. If John hadn’t come back, then this man, this brilliant, insane, neurotic man standing there in bare feet and a t-shirt, cupping his coffee and pursing his lips, would have done it again.

Rodney put his coffee down on the desk and said, “Easy. Well, obviously, since you would also take a bullet for a _geriatric cat_.” It was all wrong, because the words sounded like normal Rodney, and even the waspish tone was the same, but he knew by now how to tell when Rodney stopped blustering and became honestly angry. 

“It’s not like that.”

“Look, Sheppard, I don’t know why, after the last twenty or so times I’ve brilliantly saved your life or this entire city from utter annihilation, this particular instance should trip your martyr guilt, but I don’t have time to host this pity-party. Now get out of my quarters, and maybe while you’re at it you could learn to respect locks like a normal human being, and--”

“I didn’t mean--” But somewhere along the way Rodney had shoved him back against the wall, crowding into his personal space in a way that was all aggression and utterly, utterly different from the casual closeness of just a month ago, or maybe 700 years ago. 

“Don’t worry, it’s your turn now. I’m sure that very soon you will get the chance to do something blazingly heroic and recover all your lost machismo and no one need ever know that you are anything less than Batman.”

“Superman,” John said, reflexively. Deflection.

Rodney’s lips stayed in their tight, hard line. “Naturally. Heaven forbid anyone should suspect you of great intelligence rather than simple blinding genetic good luck. Your dirty little secret is safe with me. As for this iteration of my utter genius, you’re welcome. Was there anything else?”

“You don’t get it,” John said, miserably, and Rodney said, “No, John, _you_ don’t get it,” so John set his coffee down on Rodney’s chair, pressed his hands to either side of his face, and kissed him. 

He expected surprise or shock or outrage or possibly a punch. Instead, Rodney stiffened for only the barest fraction of a second, before pushing farther into his space and grabbing at John’s shoulders. 

Rodney had the morning breath from hell, covered by just enough coffee to be bearable, and he kissed pushy and demanding and a little bit pissy, tilting John’s head the way he wanted it with a rough bump of his nose, nipping sharply on John’s bottom lip. His hips pressed up solidly against John’s, just as demanding as his mouth, and John only had time to think, _what the hell did I get myself into?_ before Rodney pulled back to say, “Fine, you do get it. Bed, now.”

He started to obey, but before he could make it two steps toward the bed, Rodney’s hands were all over him. Rodney pulled roughly at his jacket, pushed it off his shoulders and dropped his radio on top of it and then grabbed for his shirt without a pause. 

Rodney seemed to be carrying on an entire conversation by himself, as well. He said, “Of course you would pick three a.m. for your epiphany,” and ran his tongue, hot and wet, around the shell of John’s ear. Said, “You would think I’d be used to the idiocy I’m surrounded by, but three years, seriously?” and then pressed his tongue hard over the pulse in John’s neck and licked in little circles. Said, “For waiting this long, I expect blowjobs. You have no idea how much fellatio I deserve for displaying such uncharacteristic patience,” and then gave a little groan as he sucked at the tendon above John’s collarbone and pulled the skin between his teeth.

It was impossible to pay attention, to follow the words while Rodney dug strong, blunt fingers into the muscles of his back, rubbed a hand firmly across his chest and down his stomach, cupped his ass and rolled their hips together, pressed his thumb into the hollow of John’s hipbone. 

John froze in shock, or he would have, except that Rodney’s hot breath on his ear and tongue on his throat made him jerk and twitch with pleasure. He debated going limp and playing dead, but his hands were moving without his permission, clutching at the back of his neck and cradling Rodney’s skull and roving over the solid width of his shoulders. He had almost completely abandoned the idea of escaping to the door and running in abject terror by the time their hips found a jerky, uncertain rhythm and he realized that was Rodney’s cock, sliding alongside his.

“This is better if it’s more participatory. Are you going to take my shirt off anytime before dawn?” 

So he did, and then Rodney got his belt off and pants undone and a hand wrapped around him, and John decided that his body was its own kind of mysterious alien technology and it turned out Rodney had the magic gene. 

Rodney sucked on his earlobe, and then gasped, “Forget everything I just said about you owing me blowjobs. Obviously, it has to be the other way around, right now,” and John was kind of glad he was still making the attempt to listen. Then Rodney worked his way down, flick of his tongue over John’s nipple and a sucking kiss on the curve of John’s belly, and said, “Wait, not like this, my knees won’t forgive me and obviously my knees are very important joints, essential even, things like walking and--” so _finally_ they ended up on the bed. 

They got boots and pants off somehow, though Rodney seemed completely incapable of taking his lips or his tongue off John. He licked a long stripe along the crease of John’s hip, then nuzzled and cradled John’s balls with his tongue, and John clutched at his shoulders convulsively and tried not to shake apart.

“Just so we’re clear, when I said forget about owing me blowjobs, I meant for right now, obviously. Next time--”

John ground out, “Rodney, _shut up_ ,” a little desperately, and Rodney did, and then Rodney slid his mouth down and over in a long slide of wet tight hot with the pulse and rub and surge of his tongue around and underneath and then he sucked and John clenched hard enough to leave finger bruises on the back of Rodney’s neck and came way too quickly and so hard he couldn’t even be embarrassed about it. 

The next thing he could consciously focus on was Rodney’s voice again, saying, “Oh, please say I can kiss you again. If you’re one of those guys who freaks out about kissing afterward I just might have to kill you.” So John pulled Rodney’s head down and played with his lower lip and then sucked lightly on his tongue, opening and taking and moaning softly to urge Rodney on, until he felt hot splashes on his chest and Rodney shook and shuddered and sank down on top of him.

They lay like that for a while. Rodney kept moving his head slightly, letting his nose and his lips slip over the skin of John’s jaw and neck in a way that wasn’t quite a kiss. Through a muzzy fog of pleasure and contentment, John tried to turn the argument over and around in his head. Some of it made sense, and quite a lot still didn’t, but the idea of having to think about three whole years and everything he’d completely failed to understand that entire time just made John’s mind rebel and insist on warm, limp emptiness. 

Rodney still didn’t get it, though, and that was worth the effort of trying to string a few more words together. He tried, but all that came out was, "Yeah, but only if it was _your_ geriatric cat."

Rodney blinked, eyelashes flickering across John’s cheek in a startling tickle, and hummed like he did when faced with a strange new gadget. 

Then Rodney mumbled, "Oh God, now I have to invent a whole new physics so I can predict a solar flare and go back to the forty-eighth millennium to retrieve your _brain_ , which you so clearly left there."

"Yeah, but that whole new physics thing is easy, right?"

“I would hit you now, but I’m too relaxed. Stop talking."


End file.
